No abstract

Within cognitive science, “blindness” to choice is commonly treated as typical of human cognition, implying unreliable agents who essentially lack any awareness of their own choices (e.g. Johansson et al., 2005, 2008; Hall et al., 2010, 2013). Within cognitive semiotics, however, choice awareness is seen as a continuous phenomenon, which is susceptible to the influence of a variety of factors. Manipulation blindness  is proposed as a more adequate term for what is known in the literature as “choice blindness”, referring to participants’ tendency to accept a choice as if it were their own. This suggests that “blindness” is strictly limited to the level of detection (of the switch of the preferred choice to a non-chosen one), and not to the level of choice. Using a cognitive-semiotic framework, I examine manipulation blindness as an “indicator” of choice awareness by employing the factors of memory, consequence, and affectivity, and introduce a two-level hierarchy of choice-making. 43 participants were assigned two tasks combining choices with a) two degrees of consequence (more/less) – based on task instructions, and b) two degrees of affectivity (high/low) – based on stimuli with different degrees of abstractness. Participants were first asked to state their preference for one of two alternatives (choice) . After that they were shown chosen as well as non-chosen pictures and asked to confirm whether the picture presented was the one of their choice (memory).  Lastly, they were asked to justify their choice, although some of the trials had been manipulated (i.e. the chosen card was switched with the non-chosen one) (manipulation) . Half of the manipulations were detected, and 75% of these detections occurred for the choices participants remembered correctly. While the consequential impact of the choice did not seem to influence detection, affectivity did. Unlike other experiments that investigate “choice blindness”, the results indicate that manipulation blindness is subject to memory and affectivity, suggesting that we are aware of our choices and that we have, to various degrees, access to our intentional acts.

Every day we make choices, but our degree of investment in them differs, both in terms of pre-verbal experience and verbal justification. In an earlier experimental study, participants were asked to pick the more attractive one among two human faces, and among two abstract figures, and later to provide verbal motivations for these choices. They did not know that in some of the cases their choices were manipulated (i.e., they were asked to motivate the item they had not chosen). Against claims about our unreliability as conscious agents (Nisbett et al. in Psychol Rev 84:231–259, 2013; Johansson et al. in Science 310:116–119, 2005), the study found that in about half the cases the manipulations were detected. In the present study, we investigated whether varying degrees of choice investment could be an explanatory factor for such findings. We analysed the verbal justifications of the participants along a set of semantic categories, based on theoretical ideas from phenomenology and cognitive linguistics, and formulated a matrix of eleven markers of choice investment. We predicted a greater degree of investment when motivating (a) choices of faces than figures, (b) manipulated than actual choices, and (c) detected than non-detected manipulations. These predictions were confirmed, but with various strength. This allows us to argue for both consilience and differences between pre-verbal choice investment and the corresponding verbal motivations of the choices made, and thus for (degrees of) conscious awareness of choice making.